Slashdot videos: Now with more Slashdot!

View

Discuss

Share

We've improved Slashdot's video section; now you can view our video interviews, product close-ups and site visits with all the usual Slashdot options to comment, share, etc. No more walled garden! It's a work in progress -- we hope you'll check it out (Learn more about the recent updates).

MojoKid writes "Intel's Light Peak technology eventually matured into what now is known in the market as Thunderbolt, which debuted initially as an Apple I/O exclusive last year. Light Peak was being developed by Intel in collaboration with Apple. It wasn't a huge surprise that Apple got an early exclusivity agreement, but there were actually a number of other partners on board as well, including Aja, Apogee, Avid, Blackmagic, LaCie, Promise and Western Digital. On the Windows front, Thunderbolt is still in its infancy and though there are still a few bugs to work out of systems and solutions, Thunderbolt capable motherboards and devices for Windows are starting to come to market. Performance-wise in Windows, the Promise RAID DAS system tested here offers near 1GB/s of peak read throughput and 500MB/s for writes, which certainly does leave even USB 3.0 SuperSpeed throughput in the dust."

Certainly. Once they've spent a year making thunderbolt look like a proprietary Apple exclusive, Intel will have their work cut out for them. Intel's approach to supporting TB on PCs doesn't seem any better really.

No it's been a year of geeks like you claiming that Thunderbolt was somehow an Apple technology when it was not. It is an always has been Intel technology; Apple helped Intel develop it. Apple did not get an exclusionary deal for their efforts; they simply got a year head start on all the other computer manufacturers. In that year others have implemented it. OEMs have been slower no doubt because some have wondered if I was worth implementing.

If memory serves me correctly, it took years before USB became the defacto peripheral port. In that case Apple also was an early adopter. And you are complaining about Intel's newest technology taking a year. Please let's not let history and logic get in the way of your Apple hatred.

Thunderbolt is not meant to replace USB which is another Intel technology. So if you think USB3 is going to compete with Thunderbolt, I think you need to read more about what Thunderbolt is. Thunderbolt is meant more to replace eSATA and more as eSATA is really only for the one purpose of connecting drives. You can't run USB and ethernet over eSATA.

Apple was actually a somewhat late adopter of USB. However the original iMac made enough of a splash, and perifieral makers had the decision of not being able to sell to Apple's market and using USB, and they (the perferial makers who were already in the Apple market) decided to go for it. Once they had made the leap, it was just good sense to start selling those same devices to Windows users as well.

Yes and no. Motherboards might have had USB but Windows 95 only had partial USB support as a partch. It wasn't until Windows 98 that PC users were able to use it. Apple fully embraced it by getting rid of their legacy ports. Many here widely scoffed at the "Useless Serial Bus" until peripheral makers saw that the appeal of having one universal connector.

I remember having a ten pin USB header on my motherboard (AT style) for many months before I knew what an actual USB port even looks like.

I never ended up even using USB on that motherboard; that machine just got upgraded to a newer one that did have external ports (my first ATX motherboard!) and even then, I didn't actually USE those ports until I bought a USB optical mouse months after *that*.

USB definitely got a VERY slow start on the Wintel side. Which is ironic, because the opposite just happened recently with USB 3.0; generic whitebox PCs have had 3.0 for over a year now, whereas Macs are only just getting them right now.

I also distinctly remember PC types poo-pooing the Useless Serial Bus in newsgroups, and even on Slashdot, until Windows 98 came out (upon which the PC types were able to enjoy the range of peripherals that the iMac triggered).

At the very lest have a voodoo like loopback system where you can use any DP output and add it to the TB bus so you can use that X79 chipset or that add it video card as your main video out or even put a video card on the TB bus and make it the MAIN VIDEO CARD.

Not much different than Firewire. Sony didn't help things by branding it iLink on their computers. And others called it 1394. I think that crap really killed the interface on the PC platform because Joe User didn't understand that it was all the same thing. Firewire was far superior to USB with its lower protocol overhead and reserved bandwidth.

Firewire is a fast serial port with DMA that runs on hubs. Thunderbolt is a muxed/serialized PCI Express+DisplayPort, that runs on daisychains. Firewire has its own protocol with addressing and devices and profiles, Thunderbolt just lets the PCI Express standard sort all that out.

I remember USB being very rare in the Bondi iMac days... Intel might have put the controllers on their boards but a lot of manufacturers don't use Intel motherboards, and even if they used the chipsets. Nobody (for large values of n) who owned a PC in 1998 was ready for USB when MS "got on board," they got USB when they bought their first Windows 2000 or XP system in the subsequent three years.

The question is, will Microsoft getting on board even a factor this time? Thunderbolt doesn't require drivers, it's just serialized PCI Express -- manufacturers can put these ports on their motherboards and they work out of the box.

You realise that USB was an Intel standard that was pioneered exclusively on Macs, right?

To be precise, it was a Intel, Microsoft, Compaq, and NEC standard, as you can see in the USB 1 specification. You already had Compaq PCs under Windows 95 with USB installed.

Apple probably adopted it in 1998 because its proprietary ADB was completely outdated, Firewire was too expensive for cheap peripherals, and Macs did not have the market share to impose a new competing standard.

You realise that USB was an Intel standard that was pioneered exclusively on Macs, right?

If by "pioneered exclusively" you mean "available a year or two after it appeared on PCs", yes.

The only thing Apple "pioneered" with regards to USB - thanks to The Steve - was their (now standard procedure) no-legacy-support-suckaz! attitude by flipping straight from ADB to USB with no transition period.

USB may have existed on PC's at that time, but there was little or nothing which used it. I remember buying (and still own) converters for serial-to-USB, parallel-to-USB etc for my Windows devices so they would work with my first iMac. PC's were still very much in the USB dark age at that time, and obtaining a device that worked without issues was difficult. Not impossible, but wow was USB a wasted port on PC's in those days. Even a Logitech QuickCam I bought around that time was parallel, not USB. Zip driv

For current devices, USB/SATA really don't tend to be the biggest bottlenecks.
It's nice that they're developing technology to improve this. But I have a feeling adoption of this is going to be slow going, since there's no immediate benefit and it increases the expense. I could see this quickly going the way of FireWire.

What I expect from Thunderbolt is not to use it as a link to a storage device, but to a graphic card. This way you could have a CPU and memory heavy laptop to carry around, but then you could dock it at home and connect it to the external graphic card and play some video games.

Apparently this interface can do 10 Gbps, and that sounds like a good start.

The maximum speed of the connectors from your link is 5Gbps. No indication if this is at the physical or data layers. Actual speed (from Wikipedia) is 250MBps per channel. But getting multiple channels on a small connector is difficult. From the site, one of the must suitable 4x connecors still has a width of 21mm and depth of 28mm. This won't work in modern ultrabook computers.

Thunderbolt offers bidirectional 10Gbps at the data layer. Currently, up to two channels are supported on most computers (

There's also something to be said for a universal port, one that can be used to connect anything. You get audio and video via the DisplayPort aspect, and generic connectivity via the PCIe aspect. The question is, will the cost of implementation (expensive chipsets and cables) make it useless for cheap peripherals (like a mouse, keyboard, microphone, etc). Perhaps the cost of those will eventually come down enough that it won't matter, or perhaps we'll always see a mix of USB and Thunderbolt on computers, or

7 devices per port? The 7 device limit is a daisy-chaining limit, as far as I can tell, not a maximum number of devices. How many devices currently hooked up to a typical computer are daisy-chained? The number of ports would likely be far more important than the maximum number of daisy-chain hops. Let's assume audio will always remain on 3.5mm jacks for headphone compatibility and assume that any thunderbolt monitor is going to have a daisy chain thunderbolt port at the very least.

So it can do that, but the bandwidth is a little low. Real internal PCIe is 500MB/sec per lane for 2.0, 1GB/sec per lane for 3.0. So a 16x slot is 8 or 16GB/sec. At just 1.25GB/sec, TB is slightly better than 2x PCIe 2.0, or slightly better than 1x PCIe 3.0.

Now, while even high end GPUs don't need the full 16x of bandwidth, they generally need at least 4x to perform well, and can even need more than that to utilize themselves fully.

So TB can do it, but there may be a limit to how well. It'll work for lower

At this point, most assumptions of graphics card performance are likely in terms of PCIe 2.0. So if you need a 4x 2.0 slot for optimal performance, you're probably still going to get pretty decent performance out of an effectively 2x slot.

ViDock has been doing this stuff over ExpressCard, which is 1x PCIe 1.0... That works OK with low-end cards, and with thunderbolt pushing four times the bandwidth, there should be a rather big difference there.

there's no immediate benefit and it increases the expense. I could see this quickly going the way of FireWire.

"go the way of firewire"? firewire (particularly 800) has been the fast-and-easy solution for years. Though for some reason it never caught on with PCs. (I'll assume you're speaking from a windows point of view on FW?) 79MB/sec is sweet compared to USB "high speed" that tops out at 39MB/sec. USB3 is the tech that seems to be stumbling out the gate as far as adoption goes. It had a head start on

As does the vast, vast majority of computer users out there. I don't think anyone would argue that fact, right?

That's why USB 3.0 is going to ultimately be the standard...it's backward compatible and everyone is still using mostly USB peripherals. Until that changes (which it probably won't, regardless of capability, look at how long VGA has been hanging on, and that standard is 30 years old), USB x.0 will likely be the dominant standard for peripherals based on that fact alone.

Geeks like going out and buying new peripherals to take advantage of the new capabilities of new standards. Most people, though, just want something that's going to work with the shit they've already got.

I don't think that's the target. Look what Apple has done with Thunderbolt: it's their primary docking adapter for their laptops and they've made their new monitors the equivalent of docking stations. Basically, it has just enough bandwidth to carry a DisplayPort signal plus USB.

I have a 2009 MacBook Pro which commutes with me to and from the office. It's a tad annoying to have to plug in six different cables every time I get to my desk and unplug them when I leave (which is a few times a day due to meetings). I've wished for a decent docking station; Apple seems to be averse to including a connector for this purpose, and the third-party solutions I've tried are as kludgy as one might expect. The addition of Thunderbolt doesn't have me rushing out to replace my laptop (obviously), but I'll be happy to have it when the time comes to retire this machine.

(As for why I have a MacBook vs. a Windows laptop... well, it's rather well built (and has survived a few drops to date), is Unix-y enough to allow me to develop on it and still deploy the results to our Linux servers, and has built-in grep and zsh.)

I can't speak for a macbook, but on my sony laptop the only hard wired connection needed is the power cable. Everything else is wireless (mouse, keyboard, audio, display, network). I usually don't even plug in the power during the day either, as it runs 12-15 hours on a charge.

Are you sure you couldn't cut down on the number of cables with the hardware you already have?

I can see keyboard/mouse and maybe audio going wireless. When you're pushing a high resolution monitor (24-30") wireless display isn't all that great. Also, even with dual-chanel 5GHz wifi a gigabit ethernet cable is still substantially faster.

Personally I have a Dell with a docking station connector on the bottom. Docking bay has all the ports you need: power/usb/ethernet/audio/DVI/displayport/VGA/eSATA.

I don't think that's the target. Look what Apple has done with Thunderbolt: it's their primary docking adapter for their laptops and they've made their new monitors the equivalent of docking stations. Basically, it has just enough bandwidth to carry a DisplayPort signal plus USB.

I realize you're not trashing it and it was probably a verbal slipup, but I have to say, you seem to have an odd definition of "just enough".;)

One Thunderbolt connector carries two full-duplex 10 Gb/s links, or 20 Gb/s total (bidirectional). 60Hz refresh of a 2560x1440 27" display with 8 bits per channel needs 2560*1440*3*8*60 = 5.3 Gb/s. One lane of PCIe 2.0 is equivalent to 4 Gb/s (5 nominal, but 8b10b line coding means it's 4 actual, while Thunderbolt has a much-closer-to-100% efficient line coding). So Thunderbolt can refresh Apple's Thunderbolt Display with enough bandwidth left over for >3 PCIe 2.0 lanes.

The Thunderbolt Display doesn't just have USB, by the way. It also has a gigabit ethernet port and FW800. Those, and the USB, are all local PCI Express host controllers which communicate to the computer by tunneling PCIe through Thunderbolt. That's how Thunderbolt works: it tunnels PCIe and DisplayPort packets. All other protocols require a PCI Express host controller at the far end.

Thunderbolt isn't meant to replace USB and SATA for mere performance reasons. Thunderbolt is meant to replace them and Ethernet cables at the same time. It is the most direct connection to bus as you can get. FireWire when it was released was THE best in wired transfer. It has been superseded by better technologies. Unlike FireWire, this is an Intel technology and not by Apple. Just like USB replaced serial, parallel, joystick ports, this tech replaces many different cables.

It isn't. Google for external PCIe. And theoretically, you can use external PCIe to interconnect multiple nodes (think grid computing) at native PCIe lane speed. A 4 lane E-PCIe adapter can give you 20Gb/s of troughput.

Not quite right. The current generation of SSDs (Intel 520 and others) are already pushing the bandwidth limits of SATA 3.0 (600MB/s including overhead) and are already leaving USB3 (400MB/s including overhead) in the dust now. And that is just a single disk. If you want to attach a DAS RAID for high bandwidth media editing or whatever, you better be using SAS for dedicated bandwidth to each disk or you are wasting your time. USB3.0 is worlds better then 2.0 was for storage, but it's already been outpac

Oh, Thunderbolt is totally the new Firewire. Better in terms of specs, sure, but the average joe already has a bajillion USB peripherals, and USB 3.0 is backwards compatible. I used to sell computers at CompUSA, and speaking as someone that actually dealt with the real "average computer user" (not just the least knowledgeable programmer at the office), believe me...they're going to go into the store, look at all those rectangle ports that look like all the rectangle ports on their beige Compaq tower at ho

CompUSA did go out of business (what is called CompUSA today was purchased by eMachines to act as a direct online portal for their customers to purchase their hardware, but has nothing in common with the former corporation outside of the name), but it didn't have a single fucking thing to do with the people in the stores, that was corporate ineptitude (and some theorized shady bullshit on the part of Carlos Slim Helu and his retinue) that really killed that chain off. For instance, the massive, bulk shipme

I can think of some engineering and scientific equipment that may have use for such an interface. Slow-motion cameras, high-frequency ADCs. But not the type of stuff most home users could want or afford. For them, there is one obvious application: Docking station. Just plug laptop into two cables (Power too!) to instantly have high-resolution display, wired network, external keyboard and mouse, and whatever other peripherals you need.

The TB bus would be extremely useful because it is not just high bandwidth, but (IIRC) it has a very low latency. If TB became common, one could see keyboards and synths sporting a TB bus. This would open a lot of abilities to add new features, far more than just mLAN or raw MIDI could ever do. I can see an application that allows one to use the screen on a Korg Kronos or other high end keyboard and allow one to use its onboard tools and MIDI

So let me get this straight -- people spend more than $400 for a video card so they can play some game -- enough people for there to be an entire market built around this -- and you don't understand how people would pay $400 for a motherboard (or get it free with your Mac) or $50 for a cable?

Have you ever heard of HDMI, and have you priced those cables at your local retailer? Don't bring Monoprice into this, I'm talking National chains you probably have locally: Wal-Mart, Target, Sears, etc. Even ignoring

Most people are not in it. That is precisely why it will fail. Nobody is going to put money into developing for the standard unless there is real money to be made (unless it gets forced on them, like Apple's mini-DV port), and with the ubiquity of USB (and it's backward compatibility) that means that most users are going to opt for utility and familiarity over capability.

People with real PCs don't really care that it is "an expansion interface". We already have that. This is why I can functionally replace a current Mac Mini with crappy old Compaq that I bought 4 years ago because it was the cheapest thing I could lay my hands on at the time.

The whole "expansion interface" aspect of it just makes it more of a security headache as does the display requirement.

It's a solution for a problem that most of us (non-Apple users) simply don't have.

Na the numbers might be real in jbod mode with a pile of SSD's. I do assure you that the raid will crash and need to be rebooted at least once a week and it will completely eat itself once a year. That is a feature that helps you test your backups.

The article really provides nothing worth reading. It spends a page on "what is Thunderbolt", another page on the motherboards, then a page running a *single* I/O benchmark on a *single* external RAID box, which they compare to an SSD in a USB 3.0 external enclosure (I don't even have to explain why that's stupid), before going straight to "summary and conclusions".

It's a stupid article with a single, astoundingly stupid "test", no insightful remarks or even technical detail. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

Get out the hot glue gun... Any device with thunderbolt has the full PCI bus exposed. Plug in the right gadget, which cops and crooks WILL have, and you completely and utterly own the system down to the lowest level, memory and drive contents. Best of all its hot pluggable, no reset required, heck maybe not even detectable if you do it right by splicing into a users "video" cable, etc.

The spec even allows 7 devices in a daisy chain so you can get owned by an industrial competitor, and the local cops, and

If the machineâ(TM)s OS opens up the firewire memory space, then yes. The OS has to do that explicitly (granted its BIOS could). Some OSes did this under a mistaken idea of making things âeasierâ(TM). Some (BSD) made it an option for having the most awesome kernel debugger ever.Security folks spread crap about it for notoriety...

It is that âremote dmaâ(TM) feature that makes FW so attractive - low latency + high throughput. But those remote dma requests are filtered through a

It seem like you live in dinasaur times beliving everyone only use desktops... I have not had any PCI-E card exposed at all on any of my recent laptops! Now I do not know if hot-plugging a card to PCI-E in fact can be done without a system crash, but you would need to open the case for this in a way that for sure would take some more serious action.

Now compare that with simply plugging a Thunderbolt cable to a machine - laptop or desktop...

If only they could have just multiplexed a USB over the displayport, or firewire, but no, they had to provide a root access connector that is now standardized across many devices.

You don't have even the slightest idea what you're talking about. You grabbed hold of a few concepts that you apparently don't fully comprehend and then used them to rant about surveillance. A sibling of mine posted the IOMMU thing already, but that wasn't the only howler in your post. Firewire also allows DMA [wikipedia.org] so your purported solution wouldn't work for exactly the wrong reasons you were complaining about Thunderbolt. And even if they were legitimate objections, you're screwed if an attacker has physical access anyway.

Thanks to your post I am now aware Intel come with IOMMU when the hardware has VT-d support and that support is activated (in bios?). The same is true with AMD machines with HyperTransport. I assume HyperTransport just like VT-d must be activated in BIOS for protection to be active since a disadvantage of activating IOMMU is degradation of the DMA performance.

I must say I had eliminated any laptop with Thunderbolt from buying consideration up

So much for the bad guys using it. The good guys can use it to bypass any DRM scheme. A little magic box plugs in, and watches memory as the decrypted file appears and is rendered. All that HDCP stuff is irrelevant, bypassed. Or, on the fly, keys are sniffed out.

If that was so easy, the "good guys" would have already have "regular" PCIe cards that can "bypass any DRM scheme", including "all that HDCP stuff".Where can I get one?

Get out the hot glue gun... Any device with thunderbolt has the full PCI bus exposed. Plug in the right gadget, which cops and crooks WILL have, and you completely and utterly own the system down to the lowest level, memory and drive contents.

Sorry, no. I'm a professional linux kernel developer. Unless you have something cooperating within the OS to set up a mapping any DMA request from the thunderbolt device is going to get dumped on the floor by the IOMMU. (See the IOMMU wikipedia article if you're unsure how this works.)

I don't think "matured" into Thunderbolt is the right way to put it, at all.

Thunderbolt itself is just an interim solution on the way to Light Peak.

In addition, I don't think it will be fully "mature", Light Peak or no, unless and until they can start making cheaper cables. In general, I would say an active cable is not a good idea. It really raises the price.

A way should be found to put the "active" components inside the devices at either end, with the (now much cheaper) cable running between them

A way should be found to put the "active" components inside the devices at either end, with the (now much cheaper) cable running between them.

The reason why Thunderbolt is so fast is that it doesn't have to worry about cable length. What you're talking about has already been done, it's called USB and is well suited for many applications. But the throughput on USB will never reach that of Thunderbolt. Add the availability of optical cables and Thunderbolt becomes even more impressive.

The real problem is getting new adoption for a new standard, especially when USB3 is just coming out of the gate. And for most people USB2/3 works just fine. Thunderbolt though, it won't have any place for another 5-6 years if that. And to be honest, I see devices in the near future shifting from Firewire to USB3 as well, USB is cheaper.

TB (made by Intel) is not a direct competitor to USB3 (started by Intel). While you can use USB3 for some file transfers it's not good for sustained usage. TB if meant to replace ethernet, video, eSATA and USB3 all in one cable. If you have a laptop, you can get a dock which only works for your manufacturer (and sometimes model) or you can use TB to hook all of those up. That is the promise of TB.

Except for the fact that Intel is putting it as a spec on their MBs, I would say it's more likely to get wide adoption that Firewire. Even then Firewire 400 was used by many cameras as it was the best in wired transfer at the time. Even today the original Firewire beats USB2 is sustained transfer as USB2's 480 MBs is a theoretical maximum. Firewire 800 had major licensing issues and Apple changed the connector which was a negative.

Its a nice docking bay standard for laptops. Outside of that there are much better choices for desktop PCs.

For one SAS makes a much better disk attachment interface, as the x4 links normally used for external connections are already 24Gbit, and they can be ganged together. Plus, there are dozens if not hundreds of vendors selling external SAS arrays. Many of which can do significantly more than 1GB/sec read/write.

Thirdly, I can't see anyone actually using an external PCIe enclosure with a graphics card connected over 20Gbit of PCIe. A big part of graphics performance is moving things over the bus. Its the graphics card vendors shipping x16 boards and pushing for faster standards. I can see people connecting a bunch of monitors using the display port connections in thunderbolt. I can also see an assortment of proprietary pcie devices sitting in an enclosure like that, but I doubt the market is large enough to really justify inexpensive pcie enclosures. Hence the current prices, which seem to indicate the enclosure is going to cost more than a complete PC.

I can see people using TB instead of firewire to transfer data from prosumer cameras, but I suspect that most home camcorders will be limited to USB3.

Frankly, its a docking bay standard for people who bought laptops without expresscard slots. Its also peace of mind for people buying >$2.2k laptops that they won't get stranded with USB3 and giant hubs.

great, when is linux getting it? What's that, Intel doesn't care? After multiple speeches from multiple Intel executives at several conferences they don't move at all on publishing a software spec for it. We're not asking for a diagram of how it works, (there are enough of those) give us a bus, a frequency, something!

At the very least Intel could provide the technical specs required to create Linux drivers for the Thunderbolt hardware that it makes and sells (i.e. the Thunderbolt ports on Intel motherboards that have it)

First, that complaint is true of essentially all external busses, including SCSI, SAS, eSATA and virtually everything else except USB. They're setup that way for a reason -- DMA is much, much faster.

Second, memory access on modern busses is routed through an IOMMU. This provides both memory abstraction (which is vital on modern architectures) and allows the OS to control which devices, if any, can access a particular memory location.